On Home

There was once a place I called home. A house in a city of hundreds.

It has been swallowed by my memory and buried deep in the ground, along with all the items contained within it.

A home that had a room, a floating spatial anomaly. My room. A boy’s room.

A boy’s room filled with action figures missing their arms and heads.

Crumpled comics folded under sketchbooks missing their covers. Drawings of monsters, wizards, aliens.

Tins of scattered legos.

The old, blue Datsun with the torn out interior, the windows that don’t work, parked in front of the house until it evaporated under the summer sun.

The leaning tower of bills that lived on the faded roll top desk. The lower envelopes bleached and hardened to a slate foundation. The ones on top still light and filled with potential.

Lines of ants march along the corners of the kitchen where the laminate flooring peeled away without us noticing.

The stain on the rug in the living room, all the stains on all the rugs.

The hallway cutting through the house, ending in my parent’s bedroom.

A dark brown alarm clock in my oldest brother’s room and dusty overhead lights casting a yellow glow on little spiral notebooks filled front to back with lists of things never crossed off.

Plastic, multi-colored beads in front of my sister’s closed bedroom door.

A graduate photo on the front lawn with the kind of sunlight you can’t find anymore.

A lonely dog in the concrete backyard with squashed pears and the dark, metal shed I was too scared to go into.

A father and a brother who’s lives can only be found in photographs, video tapes, and audio recordings. They rouse to life by reading the artifact of their handwriting which can only be theirs.

Three drug addictions.

Forteen screaming arguments.

Countless emotional breakdowns.

Two attempts to run away.

Annual holiday fights after dinner.

Five burned bridges.

Heartaches and heartbreaks.

Heart attacks and heart failures.

Secrets forgotten and secrets remembered. Everything carried with us.

Grocery store chicken cutlets in plastic wrapped styrofoam next to the frozen juice concentrate in an over filled, frost bitten refrigerator.

Only coming to visit from college when I totaled the truck and one other time.

Arriving to bury the last of the leaky hose and the electric lawn mower. The one with the cord I ran over twenty times while mowing the lawn and wrapping each wound in duct tape.

A life, run over and patched with duct tape. ‘Home’ written in black sharpie on it so you wouldn’t misplace it or lose it by mistake.

It was lost. Not by mistake but intentionally accidentally. By process of elimination and omission.

I didn’t say goodbye to that house in the end. I couldn’t bear to.

But it deserved that much at least. Earned that much. From me.

It had done so much for me in my reckless and superhuman youth. In my formative abandonment. It held me. Protected me and told me I always had a place.

Now that place is in pieces. Laid out in the junkyard of forgotten things. The house kept its promise to me and never told my secrets. It took them. Held them.

Although the idea of a home is not locked within the corroded deadbolts clogged in leaking pipes. It is not lost along with the popcorn ceilings and sunken living room.

I took that with me, it was given to me. That feeling of home.

Anchored wherever I find myself. To hold me and my loved ones. My pets, plants, and books. Game nights and breakdowns. Fights and uncontrollable laughter.

That is home.

You are home.

I am home.

Thank you for giving me that.

And rest well.